For me, stealing’s always been a lot like sex. Two people who want the same thing: they get in a room, they talk about it. They start to plan. It’s kind of like flirting. It’s kind of like… foreplay, ’cause the more they talk about it, the wetter they get. The only difference is, I can fuck someone I’ve just met. But to steal? I need to know someone like I know myself.
Given that I’m a self-confessed devotee of femme to femme encounters, I really was bound to enjoy Bound Sorry, but how could I possibly let that one pass? At least I had the decency to get it out of the way early..
The explicitness of the lesbian scenes between Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly caused quite a stir amongst the masses when the Wachowski Brothers modern noir hit cinema screens back in 1996. The first-time directors must have guessed the types of reaction the bed scene between Violet (Tilly) and Corky (Gershon) would engender, since they chose to shoot it several times, each take a single, continuous shot. This was done as an anti-tamper measure, so that the censors would find it difficult to cut something they didn’t approve of, and the studio couldn’t up the ante by employing body doubles to create more gratuitous footage. The Wachowskis even went to the lengths of bringing Susie Bright – the noted sex writer, editor and lecturer – on board as their technical advisor, to ensure that Gershon’s scenes with Tilly were more realistic than they might have been if left in the hands of the average (ignorant) red-blooded male.
It still proved controversial, the censors wanting to trim a few seconds from the main love scene. The DVD version has the full, slightly longer version. And even though one might conclude that the inclusion of Ms Bright would guarantee the satisfaction of the film’s lesbian audience, it appears there were a good many upset with the film, if for no other reason than – regardless of their skills and good intentions – the Wachowskis were still men.
But the average (ignorant) red-blooded males probably went home happy. And why shouldn’t they have? For one thing, Bound is a good noir thriller. It doesn’t top the greats of the genre, but it’s a stylishly enjoyable piece of twisting-turning cinema, competently directed and well acted.
And then there’s the femme to femme sex.
Both Gershon and Tilly are physically splendid, and the sparks generated from the moment their eyes meet across the elevator of an uptown apartment building are palpable. The scene on Corky’s rumpled bed is notably erotic. The two women are naked (and as I’ve already mentioned, both are gorgeous On a personal note, I happen to think that Ms Tilly has a most exquisite arse) and the sex we witness them enjoying is intense, if brief. Violet is busy fingering Corky to a sweaty, piano-driven climax, the camera sweeping down one side of their coupled bodies and up the other. It lingers over the tattoo that curls around Corky’s left hip, and the droplets of perspiration on her belly. The sight of Ms Tilly’s breasts pressed against Ms Gershon’s is only on screen for a second or two, but it’s likely to stay with you for much, much longer.
But although that scene proves to be the payoff to Corky and Violet’s smouldering courtship, it’s the teasing which precedes the bedroom denouement that makes this a stand-out example of cinematic erotica for me.
It’s obvious from the get-go that gangster’s moll Violet has her sights set on working woman Corky, and she wastes little time in making her move. Violet ‘drops’ her ‘favourite’ earring down the sink, then gets Corky to come and retrieve it. Wrench in hand, Corky wrestles with the U-bend, the water oozing over her fingers as she twists and turns the smooth metal becoming both an out-of-place phallic gesture, and yet a perfect precursor of what’s to come. Corky gets a beer as a reward for recovering the earring, and Violet earns herself some kudos by demonstrating that she understands the significance of the labrys tattoo on Corky’s bicep.
And the tattoo is the key to opening up the scene. Violet takes the opportunity to show off her own skin art, easing down the strap of her basque so that she can better reveal the violet tattooed against the upper slope of her left breast. “A woman in upstate New York did it for me,” she says in that breathless voice that balances on the knife edge between seduction and annoyance. “Took her all day to do it. She promised it wouldn’t hurt, but it was sore for a long time after.” Violet’s fingertips circle her tattoo, her perfectly manicured nails the exact same shade as the flower’s petals. “I couldn’t even touch it. Now I love the way it feels.”
Without waiting to be asked, Violet scoops Corky’s hand on to her breast. Corky is aroused and perplexed. “What are you doing?” she asks.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Violet replies. “I’m trying to seduce you.” And then just to prove that she really has been thinking about Corky all day, she licks the working girl’s middle finger and guides it between her stockinged thighs.
“You can’t believe what you see? But you can believe what you feel…”
It’s Violet’s fractured sighs of pleasure and her breathless begging to be kissed that really add the sensual icing to this cake. The women collapse on to the floor, kissing passionately and desperately. But just as Corky begins to slip her way down Violet’s body, the door to the apartment opens, and Violet’s live-in Goodfella, Caesar, walks in to interrupt the party.
I think it’s a great seduction scene. Actually, it’s so good, the fact that the bedroom denouement follows on so quickly is both a reward and a disappointment. There’s hardly any time for all that unfulfilled tension to resonate before the two leads are busy satisfying themselves. Maybe it’s my masochistic side that’s hurt by not being kept waiting for their naked conclusion a while longer.
The Wachowskis set something of a benchmark by getting the explicit sex out of the way in the first twenty minutes. From there on in, it’s about the twists and turns of the noir tale. And it’s hard to argue that the sex hasn’t driven the plot: their blatant desire for one another gives a believable motive for them to become embroiled in the shenanigans that follow.
And why does this one have a place in my collection? As I’ve said, I think it’s a good film. And beautiful, sensual women having sex together will probably always be a turn-on for me. The truth is, I’d love to watch and listen to my wife being seduced in just that way.
But I’ve no desire at all to share poor Caesar’s fate…
I have a confession: I’m afraid that I won’t be doing much – if any – new writing for the blog this month.
Before you decide to make me attend the Headmaster’s (or Mistress’ – I’d much prefer that option) I do have a good excuse. At least, I think it’s a good excuse. I’ve entered NaNoWriMo.
For those unfamiliar with the term, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. On November 1st 1999, twenty-one people committed themselves to write a 50000 word novel by midnight on November 30th. Six of them succeeded. It’s taken place every year since. On November 1st 2008, 119,301 people committed themselves to the same goal; 21,683 succeeded.
This year, I’ve chucked my hat in the ring too.
As the organisers say, this is about quantity, not quality. The idea is to force yourself to forgo the endless tweaking and micro-editing that normally happens. Just get the first draft out there, the crap as well as the good stuff, and then edit and revise in December.
So I’m not going to have a great deal of time for other work this month, I’m afraid. The going rate for a successful entrant is 1667 words a day. Today is day seven, and by midnight GMT, I’m supposed to have written 11667 words. At the time of writing (7.05pm GMT) I’m at 11019, so I’ve a bit of work to do yet. I won’t dally any longer then.
If you’re interested to know more about the project, pop on over to www.nanowrimo.org. And if you want to keep tabs on how I’m doing, my profile page is available to read here.
(By the way, my novel is tentatively called ‘The Sisters’ – and it’s a tale of lust, betrayal, infidelity and revenge. And yes, it will have lots of sex)
He looks up from the bar; her green eyes are on him again.
The bourbon emboldens him. “Like a drink?”
“No,” she says. “Take me home instead.”
She drives. Her house is dark, remote.
“I like solitude,” she explains.
She lights incense and candles, hands him wine, kisses him with searing passion.
“Sit.”
He obeys. Slowly, she unbuttons her black dress. She’s nude beneath; the pentacle tattooed upon her bare mound mesmerises.
“What do you want?” he whispers.
“Willing sacrifice.” She eyes the hardness at his loins. “And you’re mine”
He nods, craving her touch. He is hers. Forever.
I sit amidst the rumpled Egyptian cotton sheets, my back against the polished Marriott Hotel headboard, watching as she rolls on her black nylon stockings. Left, then right; the elegant reversal of the work I’d done so willingly little more than three hours before. There’s an ache inside me as I watch her, a hint of bitterness in my mouth, because the fact that she’s getting dressed means that our time is over for at least another week; she’s about to return to her life while I slip back into my own.
She stands up from the chair and stretches.
“Where are my shoes?” she asks absently as she walks around the foot of the bed. I’m too busy looking at her to offer any sort of constructive suggestion. The stockings accentuate her nakedness so deliciously that I’m becoming hard again, in spite of the two highly satisfying orgasms I’ve already poured into her.
“You’re no use,” she pouts after a few seconds of fruitless searching.
“Maybe you shouldn’t dress like that.”
“This is a pair of stockings. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You shouldn’t wear that body.”
She smiles, but she says nothing as she continues to scout for her stilettos.
Ignoring her nakedness and my erection is not easy, not even for a few seconds. “Try under the bed.”
She looks at me quizzically, and then her eyes gleam as she remembers how her shoes got there.
“You’re a very bad man,” she chides softly.
“I know.”
She retrieves her shoes from beneath the bed, slips them on and then walks into the bathroom. The three-inch heels raise her ass invitingly, but before I can compliment her on the view, the door closes between us. I shut my eyes and listen to the sound of water filling the wash basin. She never showers after we fuck, preferring to stand at the sink so that she can freshen her face, hands and armpits. She once told me that her husband was more likely to suspect something was amiss if she went home smelling like she’d stepped out of a shower in the last hour.
“Is that the only reason?” I’d enquired, instinctively knowing there was something more.
Her face coloured, and then she confessed in her little girl, “I want” voice that she liked to smell me on her when she went to bed after our liaisons.
“Isn’t that a little risky?”
“No. He doesn’t touch me the nights after we’re together. I won’t let him.”
I hear the toilet flush, and then the washbasin taps are turned off. I smile. She always pees under the cover of running water. There isn’t a place on her body I haven’t stroked, kissed, licked, sucked or fucked – all with her wanton complicity and sometimes earthy encouragement – and yet she refuses to allow me to hear her urinating.
I suppose some things are too intimate for strangers to share.
She walks back into the room. Miraculously, her dress lies semi-folded across the one of the two club chairs. The rest of her lingerie is still on the floor where it fell amidst the debris of my own unveiling. She picks out her bra from beneath my shirt and slips it over her arms with practiced grace. Unconsciously, she turns to face me as she reaches behind herself to refasten the clasp. The brassiere’s lace cups are almost totally diaphanous, and the russet circles of her areola are easily discernible, even in the half-light of our clandestine sanctuary.
There’s something so brazenly sexual about a woman dressed in bra, stockings and heels, and no panties. I have to fight the urge to slowly stroke my cock.
“Why are you looking so smug?” she asks, though I can see from her expression that she already knows the answer.
“I’m just enjoying the dazzling scenery.”
She shakes her head, though I can’t recall when she’s ever said ‘no’ to me. “You’re such a lecher.”
“I prefer libertine. Or rake.”
“Oh yes, much more grandiose.” She puts an expensively manicured finger to her lips as she ponders my choices. Her eyes sparkle, eureka-style. “From now on, whenever I email you I’ll call you ‘Rakish Male’.”
I laugh. “I love it. In fact, I’m going to create it as an email address when I get home.”
A shadow flits across her smile; a solitary cloud passing between us and the sun. She half-turns away and scoops up her minuscule panties. She steps into them perfunctorily, pulling them up her slender thighs with an almost unseemly haste.
I watch attentively as she draws the thin waistband into shallow arcs over both hips. “You look good enough to eat,” I tell her.
She says nothing, not looking at me, staring straight ahead towards the windows as she continues to adjust her attire. A sliver of real world is visible through the gap in the floor-to-ceiling drapes; outside, the cyan shade of the mid-afternoon sky has given way to navy blue. The streetlights are on, the faces of the buildings opposite the hotel becoming defined by the squares of fluorescence they contain.
Night is almost upon us.
I try lifting the mood back to where it had been. “I thought you enjoyed my compliments.”
She shrugs as she walks to the window. She holds onto the drapes, widening the gap so that she has a wider view of the twilight cityscape.
“I love this time of day,” she says, sotto voce. “I can feel it in the air; the potential that only comes with nightfall. All the wonderful possibilities that can only exist when the darkness comes. I look out across all those brilliant points of light, and I see the opportunities waiting for me, waiting expectantly for me to choose one of them. I look out across the night and I can taste them.”
I slip from beneath the sheets. It’s late, and we should be getting ready to leave, getting ready to force our way along the damp streets, through the throngs of despairing souls that fill the pavements and platforms between us and the places we live, the brick shells to which we’ve assigned the label ‘home’. But none of that matters to me right now. Her soliloquy has found my heart, caressed my spirit. I know precisely what she means, know exactly what she’s feeling right now. I feel it every time I look out across the city when the sky is sheathed in obsidian.
I brush her hair aside from the nape of her slender neck and press my lips to her warm skin. She smells of the hotel soap, and the Chanel she knows I adore. I gather her breasts in my hands, relishing the hardness of her nipples against my palms. She arches her lithe body against mine, and I press my erection against the welcoming familiarity of her arse.
“Fuck me,” she whispers.
My first thought is to guide her back to the bed.
“No, here. Fuck me so that the world and all its possibilities can see.”
Exhibitionism has never featured in the carnal lexicon we’ve fashioned together. Quite the contrary: we’ve guarded our liaison with almost paranoid precision. We’ve had to: there’s much to lose on both sides. And so the thought of fucking her as she’s asking is both troubling and thrilling in seemingly equal measure.
The most delectable pleasures are those that come marinated in danger.
She widens her stance without needing to be asked. I don’t even consider taking her panties off. I’m too aroused, too impatient to be inside her again. I slip a hand between her thighs, cupping her sex through the thin material. It’s damp with her lust, warm with the radiance of her sex. I ease the flimsy gusset aside, then guide my cockhead towards the velvet slickness within her labia. There’s no need for teasing, no desire to draw out our pleasure. We both want the same thing, want it now.
My length glides effortlessly inside her, as though my cock were fashioned from the very imprint of her cunt.
She hangs onto the drapes, pressing her arse back to meet my thrusts. I quickly release the clasp on her brassiere, slipping my greedy hands beneath the now-loose cups, moulding her full, soft flesh to my grasp. Each time I enter her to the hilt, she gasps with blissful fulfilment; each time I withdraw to the point where the corniced ridge of my glans pulls provocatively upon her labia, her sighs of pleasure sound bitter-sweet. I fuck her with long strokes, my lips and my teeth working upon the collection of delicate nerves where her neck becomes her shoulder. I hear the curtains straining in their tracks, and half-expect them to come crashing down. And through it all, she watches my reflection in the window as I watch hers, and beyond our transparent duplicates, the night watches us both.
I’ve come twice already so I ought to last for an age this time, should have to focus to summon forth my climax. The growing waves of pleasure in my loins belie that supposition.
“You’re coming to come, aren’t you?” she gasps.
“Yes.”
“So am I. Fuck!”
She grinds herself against me.
“Hard. Fuck me hard.”
I piston into her, sinuous smoothness and control forsaken, abandoned. I drop my hands to her waist, yanking her back to meet me, and she releases her hold on the right-hand drape, cupping her sex instead so that her fingertips can feverishly work upon her clit.
“Oh fuck, yes!”
As I begin to come, myriad images flood my mind: I see myself pulling out of her, my cock jerking in my hand as my semen spurts against her anus and her buttocks and the backs of her thighs; I see her whirling around before me, dropping to her knees so that she can capture my seed in her mouth and across her breasts; I see her standing to one side, pumping my cock in her hand so that I ejaculate against the window, my semen running down the glass for all the night-time world to see.
In the end, none of these things come to pass. My cock quivers and pulses within the silken confines of her cunt, and I am grateful, privileged.
My third orgasm, and, in spite of all the pleasure and passion that proceeded it, my most intense.
I pull her tight against my body, my cock still immersed within her heat, futilely wishing that we could spin the clock’s hands backwards and have our three hours again, and yet wondering how to tell her without causing hurt or offence that time is marching forwards regardless of our desires, that we need to go, now, if we’re to safely resynchronise with our real lives.
Of course, I don’t need to remind her of anything; she has just as much to lose as I do. She eases my softening flesh from hers, kisses me tenderly on the mouth, and then walks back to the bathroom without saying a word.
The door closes, and water begins to fill the wash basin.
I use a towel to dry my loins. I’ll go for a hard run when I get home, and then I’ll shower away all the scents of our union. I’ll take her to bed with me tonight, but I’ll carry her in my mind, not on my body. I’m not as brave as she is.
I’m almost dressed by the time she emerges from the bathroom. I tie my shoes as I watch her slipping back into her dress. She does everything with such unconscious grace and femininity. It’s no wonder I find her so beguiling.
“Will you zip me up?” she asks.
“Of course.”
I draw the zip up her back, fighting the temptation to kiss her neck again.
She checks herself in the tall, thin mirror on the wall. Satisfied, she picks up her handbag and walks to the door.
“Ready?”
I nod. I gather my briefcase and the key card for the door from the desk, scan the room one last time and follow her out into the quiet corridor.
The disappointment I feel as the door clicks shut behind us is as black as the night outside.
We ride the lift down to the ground floor in silence, a respectable distance between us. It’s part of the process; disengaging from one life, reintegrating with the other. There’s no alternative, for either of us.
The hotel’s reception area is busy: businessmen and women returning from a long day of meetings and pitches; tourists fatigued from hours of sightseeing; couples embarking upon their own illicit liaisons. Some will want nothing more than the refuge of their rooms; others simply seek the opportunity for revitalisation, a precursor to venturing out once more, this time in search of the city’s nocturnal distractions.
I wish I didn’t have to go home. I wish that I could go out into the night in search of adventure, her hand clutched tightly in mine.
As hoped, no one pays us the slightest attention as we stroll across the expanse of marbled floor and slip out onto the hectic street.
We walk side-by-side to Waterloo Station, from where the Northern Line will carry her out of the city. For me, it’s the Jubilee Line, eastbound.
As we ride the escalator down into the subterranean maze, she turns and looks up at me. The height difference, exacerbated by the escalator’s steps, makes her seem achingly vulnerable.
“I want to spend a whole night with you,” she says. “Soon.”
“I know. I want that too.”
Her eyes glisten brilliantly as she scrutinises my face. “I want to find out what possibilities are waiting for us in the dark. Do you?”
“More than anything.”
Time to part. It’s much too crowded for lingering goodbyes, far too public for us to risk anything but the most casual of separations.
“Soon”, she says again, and then she turns and walks away. Within seconds, she’s gone, swallowed whole by the rest of the world.
I watch the tunnel down which she disappeared for a few more seconds, and then I turn away, heading for the moving walkway which will propel me some of the way home.
Love between couples should be outlawed. Every act of love must include a third person.
I have a great affection for ‘Emmanuelle’. It’s something of a guilty pleasure, because I’m only too aware that it’s not a great film by any stretch of the imagination. But I find it still has much to enjoy.
My affection for the film stems from a variety of places. Emmanuelle was one of the first adult paperbacks I ever thumbed through as a hormonally explosive teenager. I recall being drawn to the image of a green apple on a brilliant white cover, the fruit’s skin partially peeled back, the flesh within revealed to be the shapely curves of a woman’s derrière, with the peeled skin becoming a serpent of temptation. Ironically, I’m still to read the book from cover to cover. I remember comparatively little of the text, only that it was extremely stirring to my nascent sexuality.
That I should aspire to see the film version of the story was inevitable. There was a time when I could not conceive of anything more arousing than the classic image of Sylvia Kristel: naked, save for knee-high socks and ankle boots and a string of pearls at her throat, sitting in a high-backed chair made of wicker cane. For me, it remains a highly alluring image, a glimpse back to a time when Ms Kristel was, quite literally, the queen of sex.
When I finally watched Emmanuelle, hard core pornography was a commodity far beyond the reach of my hot and sweaty grasp. Emmanuelle was as hard as I could find. I wasn’t disappointed though. Far from it. It was a quantum leap forwards from the occasional flash of breast provided by terrestrial television. Of course, having now experienced more extreme explicit pleasures, both cinematically as well as in real life, the tale of one young French wife’s discovery and exploration of her pleasure thresholds can seem a little tame today.
I still find Emmanuelle an arousing film. That’s in part due to the charm of the waif-like Ms Kristel, whose easy, almost unconscious grace and beauty combine to create an intoxicating sensuality. Almost without trying, she perfectly captures the elegance and femininity of the young Parisian wife (a touch ironic, given that the actress is actually Dutch). The story itself is paper-thin, merely a vessel by which the director Just Jaeckin contrives to have Ms Kristel naked as often as possible. Emmanuelle is a sexually naive newly-wed. Jean, her older, more experienced and somewhat sexually jaded husband, encourages her to open herself to all of the pleasures that her body can give her, whether that be with him or a variety of other partners. According to their developing ethos, the only sin is not to experience.
And it’s in the sexual set-pieces that the rest of the film’s appeal lies. The mutual masturbation scene Emmanuelle indulges in with the equally waif-like Marie-Ange; Emmanuelle’s seduction within the stark white walls of a squash court by the older, calculating Arianne; Emmanuelle being given as a prize to the winner of a kick-boxing fight, and later making slow love to the exquisite Bee; Arianne slowly lifting her skirt, revealing her trimmed mound to Jean, goading him into taking her roughly across an antique table. I find some appeal in all of them.
Yet the scene that I find most arousing – the one that I’ve chosen to talk about here – is the fantasy that Emmanuelle enjoys whilst she and the ingénue Marie-Ange masturbate together on a tropical veranda. Emmanuelle watches as the brazen Marie-Ange pleasures herself. Inspired, she tentatively follows suit, and gradually her eyes close and she drifts away into her reverie. Suddenly, we’re in the first-class compartment of a 747 airliner. It’s a red eye flight; the lights are turned down, most of the passengers are asleep.
Except for Emmanuelle of course. She’s sat alone. Restless, she catches the eye of a handsome male passenger on the other side of the cabin. Teasing him, she allows him a glimpse of her stocking tops as she refastens her suspenders. Cloaking herself with a blanket, Emmanuelle flirts still more, making her desires ever more obvious. Eventually, the man is unable to resist any longer. He goes to her, kissing her passionately, unbuttoning her bright red blouse to reveal her naked breasts. He strokes one with his fingers, nuzzles the other with his lips as he reaches beneath Emmanuelle’s skirt.
Turning her back to him, she allows the stranger to ease her panties down around her stockinged thighs, and to enter her from behind. As she cries out in pleasure, the stranger covers her mouth with his hand, his wedding ring magnifying the sense of illicitness. The scene cuts away to a view of the 747 cutting its way across the evening sky. This is soft-core after all: no come shots allowed.
When the camera returns to the cabin, Emmanuelle is sat alone once again, looking almost serene in her post-orgasmic afterglow. She is not by herself for long though. A second rugged stranger, his interest and libido piqued by Emmanuelle’s first mile-high encounter, now comes to her. Without a word, he lifts her into his arms and carries her to the cramped toilet at the rear of first-class. Placing her on the edge of the sink unit, he penetrates her without dallying, his cock (apparently) sliding effortlessly into a cunt that is undoubtedly still hot and wet and aroused from Emmanuelle’s first fuck.
Is it purely fantasy, the product of her feverish imagination? Or is Emmanuelle actually recalling the flight she took from Paris to join her husband in Thailand? The answer is left to the viewer’s imagination. I personally like to think that it’s the latter.
Why should this scene continue to stir me after so many far more explicit films, after so many erotic encounters of my own? There are a number of reasons. The sexuality of Miss Kristel; the way she allows herself to be taken by not one but two virile, greedy strangers; the almost fetishistic way that her first lover lifts her skirt and draws her panties down to mid-thigh so that he can enter her; the daring of the setting, Emmanuelle taking pleasure amongst the oblivious, indolent passengers. It all connects. I’ve even watched the scene and imagined that it’s my own wife in place of Miss Kristel, surrendering to her lust, to adventure and opportunity, permitting a stranger’s cock to enter her not once, but twice, for nothing other than her own satisfaction.
More than thirty years old, and still going strong. Vive Sylvia Kristel. Vive Emmanuelle.
He’d said he’d be there after six, but he steals into the house at midday.
Martin gone for hours, Sadie all alone.
The bedroom door ajar. Half-naked Sadie kneeling on the bed, head down, hips raised: yoga posturing.
Her black panties whip at his senses.
“I wondered when you’d get here,” she sighs.
Jellied legs carry him forward. She doesn’t shrink from his fevered gaze. Trembling, he reaches out, eases her panties back and down, baring her allure.
“You want to fuck your best friend’s wife.” She’s stating, not questioning.
Swallows. “Yes.”
“Then fuck me.”
And he does.
He does.
“I’ve a surprise for you,” he tells her. “Get ready.”
She bathes in warm cream and oil, depilates herself with precision, paints her nails the colour of conch. Then she wraps herself in a silk robe, and waits.
The doorbell rings.
“Answer it,” he says.
Three men stand waiting: mid-thirties, lean, strong. They smell of sweat and lust.
Her smile invites them inside.
Naked, she sprawls across his favourite chair, and their strong, greedy hands plunder her flesh.
“You spoil me, darling,” she gasps.
Three thousand miles away, he watches on his computer screen as they pleasure her, and smiles.
I have a hankering to revive my old ‘Scenes of Erotica’ series, in which I used to reference those cinematic moments that have stirred my eroticist’s blood. As such, it seemed reasonable to begin by reposting the first seven articles, that used to reside within the old archives. So here are my thoughts on a scene from Catherine Breillat’s 1999 film, Romance. I’ll repost the remaining six over the course of the next few weeks, and then I’ll be free to post #8…
I fantasise about a brothel
Where a head is separated from a body
By a guillotine-like contraption before the blade comes down.Of course, there’s no blade.
I wear a silky red skirt that billows up and rustles.
And those silly trappings that give men a hard-on.It’s proof a hard-on doesn’t mean they love us.
Such is the dialogue that plays over one of my favourite scenes of erotic cinema. It’s not especially long, no more than a minute from start to finish. It appears in the film Romance, a French discourse on the nature of sex, attraction and sexual identity, for both women and men. Directed by Catherine Breillat, it’s art house cinema whose use of explicit sex scenes caused some controversy at the time of its release in 1999. It’s a film that seems to polarise its audience: from what I can tell, people rarely feel ambivalent about it.
But this isn’t meant to be a critical appraisal. I just want to talk about this one scene.
The protagonist – Marie – is fantasising about being in a brothel. She – along with several other women – lie on trolleys arranged around the circumference of a circular room. The room is bright, almost sterile; given the trolleys, the setting is reminiscent of a hospital ward. Each woman is tended to by her husband or partner.
Bizarrely, the women have only the upper halves of their bodies inside the room. Their lower halves – everything from the waist down – protrude out into a dark, circular corridor, as though from the openings of pipes. The corridor is smoky; the dominant colour here is rust. Industrialised decay. The women all wear skirts, which are bunched up around their waists, revealing legs clad in stockings and suspenders. Men are able to wander around the corridor, perusing the women on offer. One man settles himself between Marie’s thighs and begins to tongue her sex, and on her side of the divide, she responds by gripping her boyfriend’s hand. As the camera returns to the corridor, the audience sees numerous men: a few voyeurs, some walking around, some standing still. The sound of the women’s pleasure echoes around the chamber. Some of the men are fucking the women, while others stand naked, masturbating, awaiting their opportunity. Marie’s expression is one of almost abstract pleasure. One impatient male – cock hard and eager – pushes his way through the crowd to replace the man already fucking Marie. He greedily feeds his cock to her, and then spills his seed across her belly.
As I said at the beginning, it’s by no means a prolonged scene. No gradual building up of tension. Rather an exquisite, revelatory explosion, almost brief enough to miss. Its impact upon me the first time I witnessed it (in a cut-for-UK-TV version) was profound. That impact doesn’t seem to have lessened, despite several subsequent viewings. I have a fair understanding as to why. The scene possesses elements that appeal strongly to my own sexuality: voyeurism; the no-nonsense directness and anonymity of the sex; women with an insatiable desire for cock; the prospect of your partner being pleasured over and over by voracious strangers. There was a part of me that would have relished the chance to be one of those men, offered the choice of anonymous cunt to pleasure. But it was more than just that; a part of me – a darker part – yearned to see my wife in Marie’s place, to watch lean, hard strangers rutting between her stockinged thighs as she moaned endlessly with pleasure. It was as though the film had found a series of random dots inside my head, and joined them up to create new and exciting vistas for me to explore.
The film contains far more sex than that contained within the brief montage I’ve described. For those amongst you with a passion for ropes and restraint, there are a couple of scenes that may well appeal to your tastes, and I wouldn’t discourage any liberal-minded adult from undertaking at least one viewing of the film. There are men who’ve derided it as overly feminist, women who’ve decried it as misogynistic in the extreme. Perhaps it’s both; after all, what better way to start a debate? All I know is that there are people of both sexes who consider it a crafted piece of cinema.
For myself … I find the film slightly pretentious, not to say a little too detached, a little too bleak in its depiction of sexual politics. Are things really that bad? Romance is never going to be one of my favourite films, though I’ll admit to finding it at times intriguing, and mildly erotic.
Except for that one scene, one I’m sure that I’ll remember for some time to come.
Originally posted 1 December 2005
“Come in,” she calls within seconds of his knock.
He pushes open the door and freezes, stunned; she’s waiting just inside, naked but for black panties and an angel’s face.
“Like?” she asks coquettishly.
“Utterly.”
She leads him to the couch, binds his wrists with his tie and then straddles his lap. She rips open his shirt, her keen teeth making his nipples rise, making his flesh sting. She presses herself against his hardness.
“We shouldn’t,” he gasps. “I’m your boss.”
She unzips him fluently, grasps his cock wantonly. “That’s why you’re here, Sir. That’s why I’m so fucking wet.”
From your vantage point in the open doorway, the world is a confusing place. Far more so than it might seem on any other day.
You’re watching your husband fucking another woman not four feet from where you stand, silent and attentive, in the living room doorway.
This is no realm of cliché, though. You haven’t crept in to the apartment in order to catch your man in flagrante delicto.
Far from it.
The truth is, you’ve been there since the very beginning, watching as he kissed her, caressed her, pressed her over the back of the leather sofa and then lifted her silken robe to bare her Rubenesque rear. You watched him move close behind her so he could glide his burnished glans across the wantonly pouting lips of her lust-glazed sex, watched their bodies stiffen in unison at the instant he entered her, as he eased the full length of his thick cock inside her. You listened to their mutual sighs and gasps of satisfaction as they fucked with swiftly growing passion.
So, no, you don’t feel confused because you caught them. You feel confused because you encouraged them, because you were the one who told him to take her, to fuck her over the back of the sofa, right in front of you. You feel confused because, rather than repulsing or horrifying you, watching them is turning you on, far more than you could ever have imagined. It’s left you wet, left you soaking; it’s made you want to drop the towel that’s wrapped around your body so you can add your nakedness to theirs.
Yet some instinct tempers your desire, makes you wait patiently on the sidelines instead.
So you watch and listen, absorbing every detail, every nuance. And after a while, the exquisite ache between your thighs grows too much for you to ignore, too much for you to bear, and your hand slips slyly beneath the hem of your towel, and you close your eyes and add your gasps to theirs as the tips of your fingers trace the first glorious lines across your sex.
You make the rhythm of their fucking your own. And as you watch and listen to them climax in near-perfect unison, your own orgasm erupts. For some reason, the same instinct that made you hold your ground earlier makes you bite down hard to still your own cries of completion.
Your eyes open again. The knife twists briefly in your stomach as you realise that he’s come inside her, that his semen has spurted against her most intimate flesh, that it’s coating her velvet walls even as you watch. But it’s a double-edged blade piercing you, the thought exciting you even as it alarms.
He leans over her as she collapses against the back of the sofa, supporting his weight with his arms. You watch the stranger press her arse back against your husband’s spent loins. Spent. He’ll be no use to you for some time. If you want fulfilment, you’ll have seek it out for yourself.
Silently, you turn away from them, walk down the narrow hallway and into the first bedroom. The strap-on that you purchased for this very encounter – a purple silicone phallus with a plush harness – is still on the bedside table where you abandoned it after the previous evening’s exertions. You scoop it up and start back towards the living room. A glimpse of your reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirrored wardrobe stops you in your tracks. You look at yourself, then flick the towel open. Unwanted, it falls to the floor.
You regard your reflection just long enough to see the wicked desire in your eyes.
They’re still locked together when you return. She’s the first to look towards you. Her eyes – vivacious, cat-like – widen fractionally when she sees your nakedness, then the strap-on dangling from your right hand. He turns to follow her gaze, and contented resignation flickers across his face as he withdraws his wilting flesh from hers and stoops to gather his towel.
Relinquished by one lover, the woman walks to you unencumbered. A silver rivulet of your husband’s seed runs slowly down the inside of her right thigh. Seeing it sends another bitter-sweet thrill through your loins. She smiles mischievously, wantonly, and presses herself against you. Her breasts are soft against yours, her nipples as roused as your own. Her mouth is soft and crafty, stirring your senses in a way that your husband, that no man, ever could. Her clever tongue finds yours, coaxing it into a graceful, swirling dance that makes you believe you could actually swoon with the delicate pleasure.
A fresh wave of lust floods your cunt.
She breaks the kiss, takes you by your free hand and leads you back towards the bedroom. You’re vaguely aware of your husband following slavishly behind you. When these games began, it was you that decried that you must always play together, in unison. The mathematics of the situation were set in stone: two plus one. Always two plus one: no other computation permitted. Yet you’ve just orgasmed while watching him fuck another woman with no involvement from yourself; and right now, you don’t give a damn whether or not he follows you into the bedroom.
What’s happening to me?
What’s happening to us?
She guides you into the room until she stands with her back to the king-sized bed. She kisses you again, more passionately now, desire overwhelming delicacy. She reaches up to cup the sides of your breasts, then slips her hands inwards, her palms and then her fingers brushing across your hard nipples. Absently, you let the strap-on to drop onto the bed and take her breasts in your hands. The soft caresses that you share wax and wane with your kisses. She makes you gasp with surprise as she squeezes your nipples between her thumbs and forefingers, and you delight in returning the favour.
Your lover breaks the kiss and eases herself away from you. You watch as she settles herself on the very edge of the bed and then parts her thighs with delicious languidness. Her eyes, wide, submissive, hold yours. The invitation is obvious. Her body, her sex, is yours to take.
Further invitation is not necessary.
You kneel before her, running your palms along the softness of her thighs. Her cunt is swollen and slick; your husband’s come still oozes between her plump labia. You lean forward. The scent of her sex – a heady, aromatic combination of feminine desire and masculine lust – makes your head spin. Your tongue flickers against her clitoris, tasting her, tasting him. She gasps, running her fingers through your hair, leaning back and opening herself to you brazenly.
There was fear to begin with, fear of how you’d feel confronted by the sight, the smell, the taste of your husband’s lust mingled with hers. But now … now the blend of her essence with his is compelling, addictive.
Rationality, lucidity, both surrendered in a fraction of a second in the face of pulsating desire.
You ease a path between her labia, pressing your tongue deeply inside her cunt. Your husband’s warmth spills over your taste buds and you accept it willingly, greedily, the nectar slipping naturally down your throat. The tip of your tongue makes darting raids upon her clitoris, but your focus remains within, and you lap greedily at the remnants of his seed until none remains.
From between her thighs, her face looks flushed, her eyes drunk with desire. She glances past you, back towards the doorway, and, with a tinge of reluctance, you follow her gaze. Your husband leans against the door frame, watching you raptly. The only emotion in his face is hunger. His cock already shows signs of resurgence.
You turn your attention back to your lover.
Her eyes seer into yours. “I want to feel your pussy pressed tight against mine,” she tells you breathlessly. “Will you make me come like that? Make us both come that way? Your hot cunt kissing mine? Please?”
It’s the most lascivious question you’ve ever been asked. It both daunts and galvanizes. Your answer, though, is inevitable.
“Yes,” you whisper to her.
She eases herself back into the centre of the bed, raising one slender leg into the air, offering herself to you once more. The tip of her tongue traces around the edges of her mouth.
Her sex is covetous, expectant. You can’t tear your gaze away from the loveliness of her vulva. Looking at her so intensely raises your skin into goose flesh, sends thrilling ripples of ice down your spine.
You climb onto the bed, positioning yourself so that you’re straddling her lower leg, so that your cunt is barely an inch above hers. You can feel her heat, and her sly smile suggests that she feels yours too. You hold her raised leg in both hands, and she gently rests her taut calf against your shoulder as you lower yourself.
“Oh fuck,” she moans as your labia press against hers. You don’t cry out yourself, but your eyes flutter closed as the warm, moist tenderness of her elemental flesh blends with yours. You hold perfectly still, luxuriating in the transcendence of your union. In your darkness, the sounds seep out of your world, until all that’s left is the feeling of her: her liquid heat, her softness. You could surrender now, let go completely, drown in her.
You’ve never known such intimacy.
You ache to be inside her.
“Oh fuck yes!” she gasps as you press a fraction more firmly against her, as you begin gently sliding your cunt across hers. Your clitoris – hard, swollen, once more greedy to be satisfied – sends out a burst of radiant pleasure that floods your loins, and you can’t stop yourself adding your own gasp to hers. You’re fucking her clitoris with yours. You can’t see it, but you can feel enough to know that it’s the truth; you’re fucking her clitoris with yours. The sensual thought, the images that accompany it, brings back that feeling of being able to swoon with the delectability of the moment.
“Oh yes! Oh yes!”
You keep your motions soft and fluid, never allowing your need to come, your hunger to bring her the climax she desires to quicken your pace or harshen your stroke. You look down at her face, watching her as her eyes follow your swaying breasts. She reaches up almost diffidently, cupping your breasts, moulding them to her delicate palms. She lightly pinches your hard nipples, sending a fresh burst of pleasure through your nerve endings.
You bite down on your lip to still your cry.
“No,” she says. There’s desperation, pleading in her voice. “Don’t hold it in. Let it go. Let me hear what you’re feeling.”
And so you let go. You sigh and you gasp and you moan with pleasure as your cunt slides across hers, and as you begin to come, you articulate the words that would otherwise have remained within your mind.
“Oh, it’s so … fucking … good!”
Your orgasm isn’t an eruption; it’s an explosion, a detonation measured in the megatons. Its power makes you shudder uncontrollably as wave after wave of implausible pleasure flood through you, and the thunderous, telltale cloud rises high into the air above, seemingly higher than it ever has before.
A semblance of sense, of sanity, seeps back to you. You realise that your lover hasn’t ascended all the way to the summit of her own peak, and so you continue to slip your sodden sex across hers, back and forth, back and forth, your clitoris fucking hers in the same, sensuous rhythm that carried you to your own climax, until her gasps of gratification stutter, until the expression frozen upon her face becomes a collision of pleasure and disbelief, and scarlet flowers bloom in her cheeks and across her chest.
Then she explodes too.
“Ohhhhhhhhh … my … GODDDDDDDDDDDD!”
You half-slide, half-collapse onto the bed beside her. You stare up at the ceiling, listening to the rapid thud of your heart gradually easing, your breathing becoming slower, deeper. You inhale deeply; the air is saturated with the scent of feminine desire. While you’re trying to think of something suitable to say, she finds her way to the punch line.
“That was wonderful.”
You nod. In the end, it’s all you need to do. It’s all you can do.
But even if you’re spent, she isn’t. She rolls towards you, and as she kisses you adroitly, she stretches an arm across you and then draws it back.
You see that she has your new strap-on in her hand.
“I want to fuck you,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about it for days.”
Again, all you seem capable of is nodding your accord.
You watch as she gets to her feet and steps into the harness, tightening the straps about her waist with composure. The vivid hue of the phallus is in striking contrast to the cream of her skin. There’s a small vial of clear oil on the nightstand, and she pours some into her palm then uses it to lubricate her phallus with flowing strokes.
“There,” she says, coming back to you. Your thighs part to admit her almost of their own volition.
She leans over you, her smile vulpine, triumphant.
The silicone is cool after the heat of her cunt. Slowly, the smooth head is stroked up and down your cleft, riding over your still-throbbing clitoris, gently probing the portal of your sex, back again, back again. You close your eyes, and images fill the darkness; your husband’s cockhead travelling along that very route, your hand around his thick shaft, guiding him, controlling him, using him as a tool for your pleasure. Coming against his burnished head once, twice, sometimes three times, and then pulling him inside you, desperate to be filled while your cunt still is still quivering.
The memories remind you that your husband is there, in the room, silent, watching. You look past her shoulder and see him approaching. He reaches around your lover, cupping her breasts in his hands, and you feel the gesture yourself, feel your hard nipples pressing familiarly into his palms. She smiles contentedly and her head goes back to rest against his shoulder. He dips his head, pressing his lips against the side of her neck, his dark eyes holding yours. And while they do, the head of the phallus nuzzles its way between your labia, and with a steady impulse, she eases it inside you to the hilt, filling you, making you cry out once more.
“Do you like that?” she asks you in a hushed voice.
“Yes.” Your voice sounds dreamy, detached.
Her thrusts are languid, sinuous; she pauses each time the phallus is fully inside you, allowing you to grind and rub yourself against the shaft, to press your clitoris against her loins. You can’t help but think that it’s not the first time she’s fucked another woman like this.
More wave of pleasure flow over you. She’s good. Very good.
She pauses, turns to look at your husband. “Do you like it? Do you like watching me fuck your wife?”
“I do. Very much.”
The tone of her voice alters, becoming petite, girlish, needy. “Will you fuck me while I fuck her?”
His answering smile seems every bit as wily and exultant as hers.
He reaches down the front of his body.
She smiles shamelessly. “You can’t see what he’s doing, can you?” she asks you.
“No.”
“He’s hard again.” She gasps. “Oh, he’s thrusting his cock between the cheeks of my arse. It feels so good, so thick.”
Her words invoke more memories; you sprawled face down on a rumpled bed, your husband laying over you, his hard cock thrusting along the oiled crevice between your buttocks, slow to begin with, a little faster with each passing minute. One of his hands on your breasts while your own hand snakes beneath your belly, your fingers reaching for your clitoris, strumming it frantically as you feel his body tense against you, as you feel the wetness of his climax pooling in the small of your back.
Your lover begins to thrust inside you once more.
“Now he’s drawing his cockhead downwards,” she groans. “Mmmm, I can feel it against the lips of my pussy. Oh, he’s teasing me now, tracing it around the very edges! Bastard. If I begged him to fuck me now, he wouldn’t, I know, I can tell.” She licks her lips. “Does he tease you like this? Does he make you want to beg to feel his cock filling you? Oh, he’s good at it, isn’t he? Gorgeous bastard!”
You nod, your eyes flitting between her face and his, watching, waiting.
He teases her for what seems an age, even to you. His gaze narrows at the instant he finally decides to give her what she craves.
“Oh fuck! Oh yes!” she gasps. She doesn’t need to. You can feel him enter her through her cock. He begins to thrust into her as she continues to thrust into you, his movements communicated to you by the phallus within you.
Each one of his strokes magnifies hers.
Such a feat of co-ordinated carnality isn’t meant to last for long; you understand that. You suspect that they do too. The languid fluidity of their strokes quickly degenerates into a frenzy of fucking, as she thrusts the phallus into you, propelled by his voracious prick.
“I’m coming!” she soon cries out. “Oh fuck, I’m coming!”
She drives into you desperately, grinding herself against the base of the phallus, and her flushed face contorts in a blend of anguish and ecstasy. At the same time, your own climax – smaller, much less consequential than the one you shared solely with her – rolls through you. A few seconds later, your husband throws back his head and joins the two of you in completion. There’s a warm splash against the cheeks of your arse. It can only be his semen. Did he withdraw from her before he came, or partway through? Did he share his come, or save it all for you?
Fresh thoughts of his seed inside her carry you back to the beginning, back to where your desire and your discomfort seemed irrevocably linked. Both your lovers join you upon the bed, collapsing on either side of you, their warm hands finding your face, your breasts, your thighs. You stare at the ceiling, enjoying the caresses, trying to sort the feelings of revelry and regret flowing through you.
Yes, the world is a confusing place. And far more so today.
